There is one part of this task of mastering our language which deserves especial notice, _viz._, the puzzling out of the meanings we put, or try to put, into our words.

Many good stories of children show that they have a way of sadly misunderstanding our words. This arises often from the ignorance of the child and the narrowness of his experience, as when a Sunday school scholar understood the story of the good Samaritan to mean that a gentleman came and poured some paraffin (_i.e._, oil) over the poor man.

By a child's mind what we call accidentals often get taken to be the real meaning. A boy and a girl, twins, had been dressed alike. Later on the boy was put into a "suit". A lady asked the girl about this time whether they were not the twins, when she replied, "No, we _used_ to be". "Twin" was inseparably a.s.sociated in her mind with the similarity in dress.

It should be remembered, too, that we greatly add to the difficulties of the small student of our language by reason of the ambiguities of our expressions, and of our short and elliptical modes of speaking. It was a quite natural misconception when an American child, noting that children were "half price" at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby now that they were cheap. Many another child besides Jean Ingelow has been saddened at being told by her father or other grown-up who was dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he "had a bone in his leg".

Much misapprehension arises, too from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way, as when a small boy indignantly resented the statement of his mother who was driving him behind a rather skittish pony, "Pony has lost his head".

Children are desirous of understanding us and make brave efforts to put meanings into our words, sometimes falling comically short of the mark.

A little fellow of two who had been called "fat" by his nurse when given his bath, afterwards proceeded to call his father "fat" when he saw him taking his bath. "Fat" had by a natural misconception taken on the meaning of "naked". It was a simple movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the Inspector, "What is an average?" by saying, "What the hen lays eggs on". She had heard her mother say, "The hen lays so many eggs 'on the average' every week," and had no doubt imagined a little myth about this average.

It is the same with what is read to them. Where they do not recognise a meaning they invent one, or if necessary subst.i.tute an intelligible word for an unintelligible one. Young Hermiston in R. L. Stevenson's last story naturally enough said in speaking of his father, the "hanging judge," "It were better for that man if a _milestone_ were bound about his neck". Similarly they will invert the relations of words in order to arrive at something like a meaning. Mr. Canton relates in his pretty sketch of a child, _The Invisible Playmate_, that his little heroine, who knew the lines in _Struwwelpeter_--

The doctor came and shook his head, And gave him nasty physic too--

was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, "And will the doctor come and shook my head?" It was so much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was carried out on the person of the patient.

There is something of this same impatience of meaningless sayings, of the same keen desire to import a meaning into strange words, in children's "word-play," as we call it. For example, a little boy about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse's neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some time. He thereupon exclaimed, "I don't think it's _new_ ralgia, I call it _old_ ralgia". Was this playful punning or a half-serious attempt to correct a misstatement? A child called his doll "Shakespeare" because its spear-like legs could be shaken. We know that adults sometimes do the same kind of thing, as a cabman I once overheard speaking to somebody about putting down "_ash_phalt". We all like to feel at home with words, and if they look dreadfully strange we do our best to give them a look of old acquaintance.

It should be added that children, though they eke out their deficiencies by inventing new verbal forms and putting new meanings into our words, have on the whole a vast respect for words. This is seen in their way of stickling for accuracy when others repeat familiar word-forms. The zeal of a child in correcting the language not only of other children, but of grown-ups, and the comical errors he will now and again fall into in exercising his corrective function, are well known to parents. Sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants. "Shall I read to you out of this book, baby?" asked a mother of her boy, about two and a half years old. "No," replied the infant, "not _out_ of dot book, but somepy inside of it." The same little stickler for verbal accuracy, when his nurse asked him, "Are you going to build your bricks, baby?" replied solemnly, "We don't build bricks, we make them and then build _with_ them". Yet such disagreeable pedantry shows how conscientiously the small curly head is trying to bring clearness and order into the dark tangle of our speech, and it ought not to be treated harshly.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SERIOUS SEARCHER.

In a former chapter we dealt with a child's mind as a harbourer of fancies, as subject to the illusive spell of its bright imagery. Yet with this play of fancy there goes a respectable quant.i.ty of serious inquiry into the things of the real world. This is true, I believe, even of highly imaginative children, who now and again come down from their fancy-created world and regard the solid matter-of-fact one at their feet with shrewdly scrutinising eyes. For children, like some of those patients of whom the hypnotist tells us, live alternately two lives.

The child not only scans his surroundings, he begins to reflect on what he observes, and does his best to understand the puzzling scene which meets his eyes. And all this gives seriousness, a deep and admirable seriousness, to his att.i.tude; so that one may forgive the touch of exaggeration when Mr. Bret Harte writes: "All those who have made a loving study of the young human animal will, I think, admit that its dominant expression is _gravity_ and not playfulness". We may now turn to this graver side of the young intelligence.

_The Thoughtful Observer._

This serious examination of things begins early. Most of us have been subjected to the searching gaze of an infant's eyes when we first made it overtures of friendship. How much this fixed gaze of a child of six months takes in n.o.body can say.

What we find when the child grows and can give an account of his observations is that, while often surprisingly minute in particular directions, they are narrowly confined. Thus a child will sometimes be so impressed with the colour of an object as almost to ignore its form.

A little girl of eighteen months, who knew lambs and called them "lammies," on seeing two black ones in a field among some white ones called out, "Eh! doggie, doggie!" The likeness of colour to the black dog overpowered the likeness in form to the other lambs close by. We shall find further examples of this one-sided observation when we come to consider children's drawings.

The pressure of practical needs tends, however, to develop a fuller examination of objects. A lamb and a dog, for example, have to be distinguished by a number of marks in which the supremely interesting detail of colour holds a quite subordinate place. Individual things, too, have to be more carefully distinguished, if only for the purpose of drawing the line between what is "mine" and "not mine," for example, spoons and picture-books. The recognition of the mother, say, exacts this fuller inspection, for she cannot always be recognised by her height alone, for example, when she is sitting, nor by her hair alone, as when she has her hat on, so that _a group_ of distinctive features has to be seized.

When once the eye has begun to note differences it makes rapid progress.

This is particularly true where the development of a special interest leads to a habit of concentration on a particular kind of object. Thus little boys when the "railway interest" seizes them are apt to be finely observant of the differences between this and that engine and so forth.

A boy aged two years and eleven months, after travelling over two railways, asked his mother if she had noticed the difference in the make of the rails on the two lines. Of course she had not, though she afterwards ascertained that there was a slight difference which the boy's keener eyes had detected.

The fineness of children's distinguishing observation is well ill.u.s.trated in their recognition of small drawings and photographs, as when one child of two instantly picked out the likeness of his father from a small _carte de visite_ group.

In truth, children's observation, when close and prolonged, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a really powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as well as exact. The boy, John Ruskin, could look for hours together at flowing water, noting all its subtle changes. Another little boy, when three and a half years old, received a picture-book, _The Railway Train_, and inspected the drawings almost uninterruptedly for a week, retaining the treasure even at meals. "At the end of this time (writes his mother) he had grasped the smallest detail in every picture."

Along with this serious work of observing things there often goes a particularly bright and exact recollection of them and their names.

Feats of memory in the first three years are, I suspect, a common theme of discourse among admiring mothers. Here is a sample of many stories sent me. A little girl only nine months old when taken out for a walk was shown some lambs at the gate of a field. On being taken the same road three weeks later she surprised her mother by calling out just before arriving at the gate, "Baa, baa!" Later on children will remember through much longer intervals. A little boy of two years on seeing a girl cousin who lived in the country where he had visited five months before, at once asked whether her dog "Bruce" barked. Another boy aged two years and ten months on revisiting his mother's paternal home in Italy after four or five months remembered small details, _e.g._, how the grapes were cut, and how the wine was made.

Nor does the busy brain of the child stop at observing and recalling what lies about him. He begins at an early age to compare this thing with that, and to note the relations and connections of things, how he is almost as tall as the table, for example, and a good deal taller than p.u.s.s.y, how he has a spoon while his elders have knives and forks, and so forth. And all the while he is trying to get at the general rule or law which obtains in this and that realm of things.

The first attempts of a child to grasp the causal connections of things are apt to be quaint enough. Professor Preyer tells us that his little boy, having been told to blow on his hand which had been hurt, proceeded afterwards when he had struck his head against something "to blow of his own accord, supposing that the blowing would have a soothing effect, even when it did not reach the injured part".[6]

[6] _The Development of the Intellect_ (Appleton & Co.), p. 155.

Since the little searcher in trying to piece his facts together in their proper connections must, as all of us do, make use of such experiences as he happens to have, he will pretty certainly fall into the error of "hasty generalisation," as we call it, taking things to be really connected which accidentally occur together, it may be in a single instance only. An American boy of ten who had happened to have a teacher who was short and cross, and a second who was tall and very kind, said to his new teacher, who struck him as short, "I'm afraid you'll make a cross teacher". Yet while we smile at such simplicity ought we not to remember that older people, too, sometimes commit similar blunders, and that after all the impulse to reason can only work itself into a good sound faculty by risking such blunders?

_The Pertinacious Questioner._

The effort of the child to understand the things about him grows noteworthy somewhere near the end of the third year, and about the same time there comes the questioning "mania," as we are apt to regard it.

The first question was put in the case of a boy in the twenty-eighth month, in the case of a girl in the twenty-third month. But the true age of inquisitiveness when questions are fired off with wondrous rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with the fourth year.

A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children's questioning is one of the ways in which they love to plague their elders. We shall see presently how much truth there is in this view. It may be enough here to say that a good deal of this first questioning is something very different. A child asks you what this thing is you wear on your watch-chain, why you part your hair in the middle, or what not, because he feels that he is ignorant, and for the moment at any rate he would like to get his ignorance removed. More than this, his question shows that he thinks you can satisfy his curiosity.

Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child's catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by a more or less keen desire for fact. The typical form of this line of questioning is "What?" The motive here is commonly the wish to know something which will connect itself with and complete a bit of knowledge already gained.

"How old is Rover?" "Where was Rover born?" "Who was his father?" "What is that dog's name?" "What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?" This kind of questioning may spring out of pure childish curiosity, or out of some practical need, as that of acting out a part in play. Thus a Kindergarten teacher was wont to be besieged with questions of this kind from her small boys when playing at being animals: "Do walruses swim fast or slow?" "Do lions climb trees?"

One feature in this pursuit of fact is the great store which a child sets by names of things. It has been pointed out by a French writer that the form of question: "What is this?" often means, "What is it called?"

A child is apt to think that everything has its own name. One little boy explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds and the b.u.t.terflies had names given to them by their mothers, just as babies have. Perhaps children when they find out the name of a new thing feel that they know it, that they have been introduced to it, so to speak.

Another motive in this early questioning is the desire for an explanation of what is seen or heard about the reason and the cause of things. It takes the well-known forms, "Why?" "Who made?" and so forth.

Who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whine-like sound of this question?

Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little "why?"

Let us in judging of this pitiless "why?" try to understand the situation of the small searcher confronted by so much that is strange and puzzling in nature, and in human life alike. Just because he is born a thinker he must try at least to bring the strange thing into some connection with his familiar world. And what is more natural than to go to the wise lips of the grown-up for a solution of the difficulty?

The demand for the reason or explanation of a thing may be satisfied by a bare reference to some other thing which is similar and so fitted to throw the light of familiarity on what is new and strange. For example, you may sometimes still a child's questioning as to why p.u.s.s.y has fur by telling him that it is p.u.s.s.y's hair. A child may find an appeas.e.m.e.nt, too, of his logical appet.i.te in learning that what is new and strange to him comes under a general rule, that, for example, many other animals besides p.u.s.s.y have fur.

Nevertheless, I suspect that a child's "why?" aims farther than this; that it is only fully appeased by a knowledge of what we older folk call a reason, that is to say of the cause which originates a thing, and of the purpose which it serves. It is easy to see, indeed, that this questioning curiosity of the little ones is largely directed to the subject of origins or makings. What hours and hours do they not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stones, the birds, the babies are made!

The inquiry into origin starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been produced by hand-craft after the manner of household possessions. The world is a sort of big house where everything has been made by somebody, or at least fetched from somewhere. And this is perhaps natural enough, for of the things whose production the child sees are not the larger number fashioned by human hands? He himself makes a considerable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, messes on the tablecloth, and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his memory by the authorities. And, then, he is wont to watch with a keen interest the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hay-ricks. To ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to apply the type of causation which is familiar to him.

The demand for a reason takes on a more special meaning when the idea of purpose becomes clear. The search now is for the use of a thing, the end which the maker had in view when he fashioned it. When, for example, a child asks, "Why is there such a lot of dust?" he seems to be seeking the purpose which the maker of dust had in mind, or in other words the use of dust. Similarly when things are endowed with life and their own purpose, as in asking, "Why does the wind blow?" Here the child thinks of nature's processes as if they were a kind of human action which we can understand by seeing into its aim.

Here are some curious observations which seem to ill.u.s.trate this childish idea of how nature's processes originate. A little girl whom we will call M., when one year eleven months old, happened to be walking with her mother on a windy day. At first she was delighted at the strong boisterous wind, but then got tired and said: "Wind make mamma's hair untidy, Babba (her own name) make mamma's hair tidy, _so wind not blow adain_ (again)". About three weeks later the same child being out in the rain with her mother said: "Mamma, dy (dry) Babba's hands, _so not rain any more_". This little inquirer seems clearly to have conceived of the wind and rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness.

We may notice something more in this early form of questioning. Children are apt to think not only that things behave in general after the manner of people, that their activity is motived by some aim, but that this aim concerns us human creatures. The wind and the rain came and went in our little girl's nature-theory just to vex and not to vex "mamma" and "Babba". A little boy of two years two months sitting on the floor one day in a bad temper looked up and saw the sun shining and said captiously, "Sun not look at Hennie," and then more pleadingly, "Please, sun, not look at poor Hennie". Such observations show that children, like savages, and possibly, too, some persons who would not like to be called savages, are inclined to look at nature's doings as specially designed to injure or benefit themselves.

There is reason to think that the idea of use is prominent in the first conceptions of things. A French inquirer, M. Binet, has brought this fact out by questioning a considerable number of children. Thus, when asked what a hat is, one child answered, "Pour mettre sur la tete".

Similarly children asked by other inquirers, "What is a tree?" answered, "To make the wind blow," "To sit under," and so forth.

Later on a more scientific form of questioning arises. The little searcher begins to understand something about the processes of nature, and tries by questioning his elders to get a glimpse into their manner of working. This quest of a natural explanation of things marks the transition to the level of thought of the civilised man.